Exploding Noema
by Alice Starling
Summary: Every moment that she is near Peter Bishop feels like being caught by surprise; like she can't seperate from what should be and what is, tell perception from reality.


_"It's called 'exploding noema'. It's a theory of psychoanalysis that describes the exact startling moment when the brain can't reconcile the difference between what should be and what actually is."_  
><strong><em>How to Rob a Bank<em>**

She catches herself sometimes, looking at him like she knows him; like his name is carved into her bones. And in that split second, she almost-but-not-quite remembers that she is someone else. She is a different Olivia Dunham and Peter Bishop is the yin to her yang-her lover, her partner, the man who has faced a million monsters with her and had a charmingly snarky comment for each one. She is-

But she's not, and she knows she's not. These moments, when reality and perception and her sense of the world get blurred beyond belief, must be the result of this Peter Bishop messing with her mind. She knows what's real and Peter Bishop's life is not.

(One day when she voices this in a fit of anger-because no one has ever really gotten under her skin the way he does-he gives her this little smirk that makes her bones prickle and says, "Real is just a matter of perception." For a moment she feels like she's falling, and that night she dreams that she's lost through the looking-glass and forgotten who is she is and it's only the memory of _him_ that pulls her back.)

Agent Lee convinces her to come drinking with him one night, although she should have realized that he would invite Peter, too. Lincoln and Peter have become good friends, oddly enough, and it annoys Olivia to no end; but she tolerates Peter's presense as she loses herself in her scotch. After she's had a couple, she brings up her dream for some stupid reason-like she can force Peter to sharpen and clear her blurred reality. But to her surprise, he doesn't mock her-no, he gets this serious look on his face, like he's about to remind her of something terribly important.

"It wasn't me that brought you back. It was you. They took you away and changed your reality, but you found yourself through sheer force of will." Peter leans close to her, closer than he's ever been to her before but her body prickles like this is all familiar. He glances at Lincoln, who seems very committed to studying the label on his beer, and then says to her, "You're the strongest person I've ever met." He laughs lightly. "You're so much stronger than me. They took away what was real, and _you found yourself_. Now I need you to find me."

She doesn't know what to say to this, so she just turns away and finishes her scotch, wondering idly if this is why the other Olivia doesn't drink and then wondering how she knows that.

Her entire life becomes like the way she feels in that moment she goes to take a sip of coffee, only to discover that someone has fixed it wrong. She is unsure, teetering on the edge between reality and perception, except she doesn't know which is which and so it never ends.

Except-real is just a matter of perception.

"I'm almost glad," Peter says one day, mildly. "That this world is-different. I mean, my father isn't as-functional as he was, and there is the small drawback of no one remembering me. But there were people who died before, that shouldn't have, and they're still alive here." He grins here, a (familiar) little half-smile that tugs on her heartstrings. "And you're mostly the same, even if I thought you weren't at first. Maybe I'd forgotten how scary you are to people that you don't like and don't trust. But not even history being rewritten could change you much."

She takes this as a compliment.

"You told me once that I belonged with you," he says then, and she stiffens. He's said before that they had been together in his timeline, but hasn't said anything about it otherwise, maybe in respect to how uncomfortable it makes her. "Not even being wiped from existence could keep me away from you."

He says it matter-of-factly, like he doesn't care whether or not she believes him. Like he really does belong with her and she's forgotten but she'll remember soon enough. She wants very much to hate him for this feeling, for every feeling, but there remains the fact that the hole in her heart seems almost lesser at the sight of him.

She is so very afraid that he's telling the truth.

Reality and perception-she wonders which one it is that, in her idle moments, reminds her what his eyes look like in the morning when he's just woken up or the way that he looks at her when she's saved his life, because he knows that she will always come for him, like no force on heaven or earth. But she doesn't remember these things, not actual memories-just stirrings in her heart, a memory of a feeling, and then again that moment when she's trapped between what is and what should be and what never was.

The scary part is that one day, when Peter is taken by a serial killer and Olivia comes for him, like no force on heaven or earth, the look in his eyes is exactly what she thought or imagined or half-remembered it would be.

The longer that she is around Peter Bishop, the more that her moment of confusion-of being unable to reconcile betweeen perception and reality-seems to blur. It never resolves itself, and her life never suddenly rights itself into reality; it's more of a slurring feeling, like reality and perception are twisting together, until one morning she gets up and goes to work and looks into Peter Bishop's stormy blue eyes and realizes that everything is what it should be.

"You belong with me," she says to him, because even if she doesn't remember saying it the first time, it's true. Not because it's fate; not because it's what is or what should be or what never was, although it is all of these things.

He belongs with her because she is Olivia Dunham and he is Peter Bishop and whenever she sees him, she feels whole.

He smiles and they save the world; together they battle a million monsters, and he has a charmingly snarky comment for each one.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: I love, love, love that quote, from the movie _How to Rob a Bank_, which I highly recommend. And somehow it seemed to mesh with my idea of where Olivia must be.**


End file.
